Frankenstein: The College Years

A teen exploitation film without a good exploitation film’s gratuitous skin or energetic vulgarity, Frankenstein: The College Years is a pointless TV movie. It stars William Ragsdale, the inside of whose skull provides the weekly setting for Fox’s horrible Herman’s Head. Here, Ragsdale plays a premed student who comes upon a modern version of Frankenstein’s monster (Vincent Hammond).

This is the sort of movie in which the mere sight of an ungainly monster trying to dance to rap music is supposed to reduce us to teary laughter, in which some-one says of the monster, who has been renamed Frank N. Stein, ”Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish.”

Only one performer stands out: Larry Miller, a comedian who has attracted some attention for his sharp, understated stand-up act, has a ball as a mean research scientist who’s trying to steal Frank away from Ragsdale’s character. Miller, who also appears in the current theatrical release Necessary Roughness, delivers his tired punch lines with hilarious ferociousness, biting into sentences and shaking them until they yield laughs. It’s a heroically dogged performance in a lazy movie. D+